4/21/2007 @ 8:00AM

The Inside-Out Web

What will replace the Internet? Something safer, more personal, more manageable.

My new computer is snazzier, more powerful and a lot cheaper than my old one. So why did I and my two sons (who are both late-model, computer-literate teenagers) wait three weeks to unpack it? Because we knew that, once we opened the box, there would be hell to pay before we had the thing set up properly. Setting up the new machine is easy: Unpack, plug in, turn on, connect to the Internet. But years’ worth of vital electronic documents are trapped on the old machine. In 2007 making old stuff available on a new computer ought to be a ten-second job. But modern software specializes in making simple jobs hard–and the transfer took one whole barking, screaming headache of an afternoon.

The transfer task is a small symptom of a big problem. The solution lies not in the computer but in the Internet and the Web. Right now the Web is built from the bottom up. Its structure of linked sites reflects the underlying machinery: lots of servers in a dense rabbit warren of connections. Links connecting computers are less numerous than those connecting Web sites because software connections are cheaper than physical ones. Yet both structures find inspiration in the same glorious strategic vision: total chaos. Today’s Web is indeed weblike, but it’s no beautiful design of the sort talented spiders weave; it is a tangled cobweb of the type you find in broken-down shacks and haunted houses.

The next Web–the Worldbeam, we call it–will resemble today’s Web imploded or, if you prefer, turned inside out. It will be a single global “information beam.” Every Web page ever posted is in this beam. Whenever someone updates a page or designs a new one, it is added to the end. The Worldbeam is a stream of many separate documents–or a beam with many documents dissolved in it, held in suspension. Both metaphors are useful.

The Worldbeam is a constantly growing journal or time line of electronic documents. Its storage is dispersed over many machines for reliability and safety, but to users the Beam looks like one structure. Like so much contemporary software, it is created by two programs working together, one on a server (or many servers) and another on your own machine; these programs allow your machine to be an “empty” computer most of the time. Information is downloaded automatically and fast when you need it, and erased when you don’t.

The Worldbeam and another design construct, the Empty Computer, go hand in hand. You will never again need to move information from computer A to computer B because your electronic documents are stored on the Worldbeam, which is available on every Internet-connected computer (or
Palm
or Razr) automatically. Merely identify yourself to any computer anywhere and your information is already there, welling up as naturally as seawater in a scooped-out hole on the beach.

The Worldbeam is a work in progress based on a research partnership between me and Ajay Royan, whose day job is at a West Coast hedge fund. Enough software exists to convince us that lots of hard work, but no basic unsolved problems, lie in the way of a finished prototype perhaps 18 months from now. Our project is intended to yield a basic Beam and a suite of protocols, so that new apps can extend the system into such critical areas as health care, education and financial services.

What will it look like? When you tune in a beam, you will see each new element as it arrives; the beam moves continuously, backing slowly into the past at the speed of time, toward the rear of the simulated volume right behind your computer screen. You see a “parade” of documents, each represented by a single vertical-standing page–as if you were watching a file of soldiers from directly in front and slightly above. Each soldier is backing slowly, continuously away, and new ones materialize continuously in front. At any moment you see perhaps 30 or 40 documents onscreen. You can rewind, fast-forward or search.

Many sorts of information are blended together in the Worldbeam, just as many colors are combined into a beam of white light.

You and you alone can filter out and examine your own private beam–a documentary history of your life. Your beam consists of every electronic document you have ever created or received, in chronological order. Every e-mail and voice mail and MP3 and project report, snapshot, video, shopping list–all there, encoded, for your eyes only. Your private documents are encrypted automatically; to get access to the Beam you’ll need to pass a biometric test, provide a password and, probably, a key card. It sounds cumbersome but will become as natural as starting your car. (A related experiment called MyLifeBits is being conducted by Gordon Bell, a software theorist at
Microsoft
. Our work is based on an earlier project with Eric Freeman called “Lifestreams,” begun in 1994.)

Each family member has his own sub-beam; the family itself has one, too, consisting of all private documents of general interest. Snapshots, e-mail from relatives, videos and MP3s are on the family beam. So are announcements (“I’ll be back at 10,” “Take out the garbage”), shopping lists, scanned-in children’s drawings–mementos of the sort parents ordinarily store lovingly and never see again. Or you can mix an everyone-on-this-block beam, an everyone-with-kids-in-this-school beam.

Are you afraid that you’d have to spend two hours a day assigning access privileges to every part of your Beam? Don’t be. Whenever you create a new document, it’s born with the same permissions as previous documents of the same type. (Your personal beam contains load of information about your habits and preferences.)

Every organization will tell its ongoing life story via electronic documents. A newspaper will generate a beam of stories and photos. (Fresh stories are posted at the end of the beam as soon as they are filed.) If you get your news from three newspapers, one cable channel and 12 blogs, you can blend their streams and keep an eye on them all simultaneously. When you tune in your custom-blend news stream, you see a time-ordered list of postings–the world according to all 16 of your sources interleaved, shuffled together.

A car company generates a stream of product descriptions plus p.r. announcements. An HMO’s beam will be restricted: Every patient’s medical history is a separate sub-beam available in whole or part to medical staff members who need to know.

Organizations will be able to link separate documents as if they were Web pages, and users can look at one page at a time. You can still have a conventional Web site if you want. But many users will prefer for the whole story to be laid out before them as an array of separate journal pages and will browse or search without following links. Our first versions use an ordinary keyword search, but we’ve developed intelligent search procedures that find relevant stream-elements even if they make no explicit mention of the search terms you typed. We can use on-beam documents themselves to help generate clusters of words with similar meanings.

The Worldbeam’s significance lies in several areas. Separate beams can be isolated and then blended ad hoc, like custom cappuccinos. Each user has individual access rights to each sub-beam. To make everyone’s life easier, the Beam will make it possible for today’s conventional desktop computers and electronic gadgets to be replaced by empty computers. The Beam is a natural platform for a new universe of software apps and for global open markets and will help keep your electronic assets secure and private. You’ll subscribe to a local Beam service that offers security and global access, and be able to buy, lease or help yourself to fancier apps if you need them. The desktop is dead; all my information must be stored on the Beam in the cybersphere, and be available to me on any machine anywhere.

Apps of all kinds ride the Beam–apps that make markets, spot and help visualize trends, allow like-minded groups to exercise political power, make electronic elections possible–ad infinitum.

New technology should encourage markets without boundaries, where buyers find perfect sellers and vice versa no matter where they are or what sorts of goods or services they are trading. Everyone can post forms to the Worldbeam–to buy a million shares of Plotzco or sell a puppy. Merchants can be as exclusive as they like, can make their forms visible to billionaire traders only or to the whole world. And they can hire any matchmaker software app they choose to scan the Beam and connect buyer to seller.

Every computer user turns to the Beam first. All my personal documents are stored there. Any doctor, say, who sees me stores my health data with my permission on my personal beam. As time passes, the medical story of my life accumulates on the Beam; it’s all right there if anyone needs it. Hospital staff add data to the same beam. When someone writes a prescription, sophisticated apps scan my medical life story to make sure the Rx makes sense; then it becomes part of the beam itself. The Worldbeam has moral and social dimensions as well as commercial implications.

In today’s computing environment, it’s easy for spies, bureaucrats and thieves to “share” private information that isn’t theirs and (paradoxically) hard for public agencies to share information in the public interest. When thieves or spies break into computers, they ought to find gibberish, but software discourages the use of encryption–which makes as much sense as a bank manager’s discouraging customers from locking their safe-deposit boxes. What could be simpler or more sensible than writing “burn this letter” at the bottom of a personal, confidential, amorous or libelous communication? Yet the e-mails you write are virtually tattooed to your hide forever, impossible to expunge.

Modern technology makes it too easy for unauthorized characters to gain control over parts of your life and too hard for the government to wield the powers we want it to–for example, marshaling information to fight terrorism. The Internet’s bottom-up design makes information-sharing hard. It encourages proliferating information baronies instead of one national security pool. The underlying moral threat is passivity; too many of us view computers and the Internet as we do spy satellites that photograph us from Up There. We can’t control them, so why think about them? When technology encourages passivity, it is attacking liberty and democracy at their roots.

The Internet’s opacity yields incomprehension and passivity. The Beam is transparent. You control access to every piece of information on your own sub-beam. If an electronic document is not on the Beam, it’s nowhere. Simple rules yield clarity and put users in control.

Today virtually all technology projects have moral implications. Technology like the Worldbeam should strengthen the world’s responsible governments against terrorists and criminals, and the individual against busybodies (government-hired or free agents) who find it all too easy to violate private stores of information. The Internet tells government agencies: You each have a separate information stash and your own network; sharing information requires extra effort. The Beam tells them: At base you all share one information stash; withholding information requires extra effort. Private sub-beams are subsets of the all-inclusive Worldbeam, and no one can plead “technical reasons” for not sharing.

The Web was a brilliant invention. The Beam is a natural next step. Children live in the present. We don’t discover “the past” until we are old enough to have one, at least a bit of one; and we discover the future by analogy with the past. One of them stretches out behind us, the other in front. The Web tells us what is going on all over the place, right now. It expanded our view of the present–maybe our very definition of “the present.” The Beam shows us the same sprawling, enormous “now” that we see on the Web but shows us the past and future, too. Wisdom requires grasping the past: its tidal rhythms, its implications for us today. Only by grasping the past can we understand the present and make good guesses about the future. The Beam specializes in helping us grasp time and the past, and where we are–and where we are headed.

David Gelernter is a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of computer science at Yale University.